That time I fell for a fake 'As Seen On TV' ad for 3 years

I used to buy those magnetic bracelet things from a website that looked legit. Turns out the 'testimonials' were just stock photos from a 2012 catalog. What tipped me off was when I spotted the same 'customer' on an ad for a vacuum cleaner 6 months later. Felt like an idiot but now I reverse image search everything before I click buy. Anyone else get tricked by those fake review sites?

3 comments

3 Comments

leo_black7627d ago

Reverse image searching everything before you buy sounds exhausting and honestly kind of paranoid. Stock photos get reused across a thousand different ads, that doesn't mean the product is fake. I've bought plenty of magnetic bracelets and As Seen On TV stuff from random websites and they worked fine. Maybe you just got a bad batch or had unrealistic expectations about what a magnetic bracelet can actually do. Three years of buying them without noticing says more about you not doing basic research than it does about the ads being deceptive.

nguyen.blake27d ago

The thing that got me was a fake "miracle knife" set I bought years ago. The infomercial showed it cutting through a soda can and a shoe, so I thought it was legit. Then I tried it on a tomato and it just squished it flat. I later found that exact same infomercial footage used by three different websites with different brand names. Kinda opened my eyes to how much of that stuff is just the same video repackaged. @leo_black76, you might have gotten lucky with your bracelets, but the whole industry is full of tricks like that.

beth27627d ago

People get burned by one bad purchase and suddenly the whole industry is a scam. Plenty of folks buy stuff from those ads and it works well enough for what it is. If you buy cheap knives from an infomercial and expect professional quality, that's more on you than the ad.